Philosophers From Germany

"It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it."

"The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are — terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils."

"Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all — why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?"

"Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for 'one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right'. You long for freedom? You fools! If you took might, freedom would come of itself. See, he who has might 'stands above the law'. How does this prospect taste to you, you 'law-abiding' people? But you have no taste!"

""Freedom" awakens your rage against everything that is not you; "egoism" calls you to joy over yourselves, to self-enjoyment."

"Now, on the contrary, when every one is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery. If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man. Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. [...] His labor is nothing taken by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another's hands, and is used (exploited) by this other."

"The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss."

"Whether nature gives me a right, or whether God, the people's choice, etc., does so, all of that is the same foreign right, a right that I do not give or take to myself. Thus the Communists say, equal labour entitles man to equal enjoyment. [...] No, equal labour does not entitle you to it, but equal enjoyment alone entitles you to equal enjoyment. Enjoy, then you are entitled to enjoyment. But, if you have laboured and let the enjoyment be taken from you, then – ‘it serves you right.’ If you take the enjoyment, it is your right; if, on the contrary, you only pine for it without laying hands on it, it remains as before, a, ‘well-earned right’ of those who are privileged for enjoyment. It is their right, as by laying hands on it would become your right."

"The workers have the most enormous power in their hands, and if one day they became truly aware of it and used it, then nothing could resist them; they would only have to stop work and look upon the products of work as their own and enjoy them. This is the meaning of the labor unrest that is looming here and there. The state is founded on the-slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the state is lost."

"The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age."

"Political freedom means this: that the polis, the state, is free; religious freedom this: that religion is free, just as freedom of conscience indicates that conscience is free; thus, it does not that I am free from state, from religion, from conscience, or that I am rid of them. It does not mean my freedom, but the freedom of a power that rules and vanquishes me; it means that one of my oppressors, like state, religion, conscience, is free."

"Feuerbach … recognizes … "even love, in itself the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one through religiousness, since religious love loves man only for God’s sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only.” Is this different with moral love? Does it love the man, this man for this man’s sake, or for morality’s sake, for Man’s sake, and so—for homo homini Deus—for God’s sake?"

"He who is infatuated with Man leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest. Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook."

"Criticism actually says: You must free your I so completely from all limitations that it becomes a human I. I say: Free yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; because it is not given to everyone to break through all limits, or, more eloquently: that is not a limit for everyone which is one to the others. Consequently, don’t exhaust yourself on the limits of others; it’s enough if you tear down your own. Who has ever been able to break down even one limit for all people? Aren’t countless people today, as at all times, running around with all the “limitations of humanity”? One who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair."

"For the state it is indispensable that nobody have an own will; if one had, the state would have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do away with the state. (...) The own will of me is the state's destroyer; it is therefore denounced by the state as 'self-will'. Own will and the state are powers in deadly hostility, between which no 'perpetual peace' is possible. As long as the state asserts itself, it represents own will, its ever-hostile opponent, as unreasonable, evil; and the latter lets itself be talked into believing this."

"Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you. You have a fixed idea! Do not think that I am jesting or speaking figuratively when I regard those persons who cling to the Higher, and (because the vast majority belongs under this head) almost the whole world of men, as veritable fools, fools in a madhouse. What is it, then, that is called a "fixed idea"? An idea that has subjected the man to itself. When you recognize, with regard to such a fixed idea, that it is a folly, you shut its slave up in an asylum. And is the truth of the faith, say, which we are not to doubt; the majesty of (e. g.) the people, which we are not to strike at (he who does is guilty of — lese-majesty); virtue, against which the censor is not to let a word pass, that morality may be kept pure; — are these not "fixed ideas"? Is not all the stupid chatter of (e. g.) most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, Christianity, etc., and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space?"

"I love men too, not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love'."

"[...] then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be somewhat expressed as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person."

"What is not supposed to be my concern! First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!""

"The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered "practical men." Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled they continue drilling."

"I have no need to take up each thing that wants to throw its cause on us and show that it is occupied only with itself, not with us, only with its good, not with ours. Look at the rest for yourselves. Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?"

"If man puts his honor first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying himself, this in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes a strange impenetrable object a barrier and a hindrance to his self-knowledge."

"If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstance in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls."

"The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is — unique, as I am unique. Nothing is more to me than myself!"

"Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality."

"If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal or free man. Truth consists in nothing other than man's revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness. Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are there, they are there in spite of school."

"It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. Each sort of corresponding pride and every wind of covetousness, eagerness for office, mechanical and servile officiousness, hypocrisy, etc., is bound as much with extensive knowledge as with elegant, classical education, and since this whole instruction exercises no influence of any sort on our ethical behavior, it thus frequently falls to the fate of being forgotten in the same measure as it is not used: one shakes off the dust of the school."

"The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes itself and creates itself as a spirit "which builds its own body.""

"On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there is the matter ended,—to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman's concern."

"Wollen wir etwa die Pädagogik den Philosophen in die Hände spielen? Nichts weniger als das! Sie würden sich ungeschickt genug benehmen. Denen allein werde sie anvertraut, die mehr sind als Philosophen, darum aber auch unendlich mehr als Humanisten oder Realisten."

"In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only "useful citizens" out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people. Our good background of recalcitrancy [sic] gets strongly suppressed and with it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school is then philistinism."

"Atheists keep up their scoffing at the higher being, which was also honoured under the name of the 'highest' or être suprême, and trample in the dust one 'proof of his existence' after another, without noticing that they themselves, out of need for a higher being, only annihilate the old to make room for a new."

"Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices."

"Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right one. [...] Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends on us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to make us creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? [...] Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question."

"Stirner makes no attempt to distinguish between feeling 'at home' and being subjugated. 'Belong­ing' can of course connote being a part of as well as being the rightful possession of; 'bonds' can similarly suggest solidarity as well as that which shackles; 'ties' can provide security as well as bind. Stirner, however, never seriously considers the possibility that these communities might fulfil, still less that they can empower, individuals. It seems that belonging to a 'natural' community is equivalent to being owned by another, and 'the individual', writes Stirner, 'is the irrecon­cilable enemy of . . . every tie, every fetter' ( p. 192)."

"The conflict between individual and society, like the conflict between the child and mother, comes from the adult preference for a less suffocating environment, and society, like the mother, must strive to destroy the individual's autonomy and inhibit her maturity if the original relationship is to be maintained."

"Individuals have also been held to have obligations generated by their membership of communities that they neither create nor choose to belong to, communities bound by 'natural ligature[s]' (p. 276 ) such as 'blood', locality, language, class, and common disposition. Stirner's predictable response to the resulting conflict between such obli­gations and 'ownness' is to reject the value of community in all its forms. The sentimental blandishments of German nationhood, for example, are ridiculed as 'general, abstract, an empty, lifeless, concept' (p. 205) ; patriotism, he insists, is incompatible with egoism (p. 32 ). Similarly, because of the potential conflict between family obligations and personal interests, Stirner insists that individuals should act autonomously and follow their own good, rather than succumbing out of 'weakness' to either the will of another family member or the sacred in the form of 'family honour'; 'the forming of family ties', claims Stirner, 'binds a man' (p. 102)."

"Stirnerian self-mastery thus has both external and internal dimen­sions, demanding not only that we avoid subordinating ourselves to others, but also that we avoid submitting to our own appetites or ends. Stirner accepts the claim that if any idea or desire 'plants itself firmly in me, and becomes indissoluble', then I have 'become its prisoner and servant, a possessed man' (p. 127). This attack on the Christian 'fixedity' of ideas does not entail that the egoist can no longer allow herself to have ideas, but rather that she must never allow an idea to make her 'a tool of its realization' (p. 302). The egoist must exercise 'power' not only over 'the exactions and violences of the world', but also exercise this 'power over my nature' and avoid becoming the 'slave of my appetites' (p. 295). Stirner thus encourages the individual to cultivate and extend an ideal of emotional detach­ment towards both her passions and her ideas."

"Socrates was a 'fool' to concede to the Athenians the right to con­demn him; his failure to escape was a 'weakness', a product of his 'delusion' that he was a member of a community rather than an individual, and of his failure to understand that the Athenians were his 'enemies', that he himself and no one else could be his only judge (p. 191). Alcibiades, in contrast - who, amongst other infamies, fled Athens to avoid trial when he was suspected of complicity in the mutilation of the Hermae - is praised as an 'intriguer of genius' (p. 191), an egoist who undermined the state precisely by breaking with the ancient prejudice that individuals were free only if, and to the extent that, they were members of a free community."

"In contrast to Stirner's rejection of civil disobedience is his notori­ous endorsement of crime. Stirner denies that crime is peculiarly concerned with direct relations between individuals; rather, it mediates the relation between an individual and the sacred (in the form of legality). The criminal is punished not by individuals for actions which have harmed them, but by the state for actions which have undermined some fixed idea (without the legal recognition of the sanctity of marriage, for example, infidelity is not a 'crime' what­ever its effects on individuals). Crime will accordingly disappear with the epoch of egoism, when actions are judged by their effect on individual interests (not their effect on the sacred). Meanwhile, Stirner defends the individual act of crime as an assertion of individ­ual autonomy against its chief usurper, weakening the 'cement' (respect for law) which holds the state together. In more generalized form - and drawing a distinction between 'revolution' (which seeks to erect a new social order) and 'insurrection' (which represents the opposition of individuals to any order) - Stirner even suggests that crime has a unique insurrectionary potential which might eventually destroy the state."

"I am happy to be called a Stirnerite anarchist, provided 'Stirnerite' means one who agrees with Stirner's general drift, not one who agrees with Stirner's every word. Please judge my arguments on their merits, not on the merits of Stirner's arguments, and not by the test of whether I conform to Stirner."

"Stirner occupied a disoriented historical moment, one before the experience of capitalism and industry had been filtered through the paradigmatic Marxian idioms. Moreover, Stirner did attempt to tackle the social phenomenon of "pauperism" (the progressive impoverishment of the lower social strata) which has been identified as the "dominant" social issue of "pre-March" period. [..] Pauperism differed much from traditional poverty. It was collective and structural rather than determined by individual contingencies. Stirner recognized this social phenomenon and discussed it at length in The Ego. He was not failing to grasp the true "social question" as Marx makes out; instead he was analyzing his own reality: the parochial, yet unique, pre-Industrial phase of German history – what Eric Hobsbawn called "the last, and perhaps worst, economic breakdown of the ancien régime".""

"Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously."

"Stirner thus goes beyond both Marxism and anarchism, creating the possibility for a new way of theorizing politics—a possibility which will be developed by poststructuralism. Stirner occupies a point of rupture in this discussion: the point at which anarchism can no longer deal adequately with the very problematic that it created—the problem of the place of power. He is the catalyst, then, for an epistemological break, or perhaps more accurately, a break with epistemology altogether. Above all, Stirner’s explorations into the nature of power, morality, and subjectivity, have made it impossible to continue to conceptualize an uncontaminated point of departure, the pure place of resistance which anarchism relied so heavily upon. There is no longer any place outside power which confines power which political theory can find sanctuary in."

"Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority."

"Take the example of the 'avaricious man' who sacrifices everything else in order 'to gather treasures' (p. 70); his actions are clearly self-interested (he acts only to enrich himself ), but it is an egoism that Stirner rejects as 'a one-sided, unopened, narrow egoism' (p. 70), because with the subordination of everything to a single end, that end begins to 'inspire, enthuse, fanaticize' us, it 'becomes our - master' (p' 58). In short, this one­ sided, 'self-sacrificing' egoism is rejected because it violates our 'ownness'; the avaricious man, Stirner suggests, rather than being self-determining, is 'dragged along' (p. 56) by his appetites."

"Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church, … without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon,—so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, etc., without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman’s delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them—lays hands on the sacred!"

"There is an important law of nature which should never be lost sight of, I mean that of our maturity for death. Death is not a cutting off of being, but a transition, a passing from one form of being to another. Both conditions, here and hereafter, so depend on each other, and are so inseparably connected, that the first moment there can only commence with the last moment here, when the perfect development of the being is completed. No human wisdom can calculate, no inward feeling can show, the moment of this maturity for death, or the impossibility of advancing farther; to attempt this would be the vain presumption of human pride. He only who is in a position to penetrate and understand our whole being can do this ; and it is the dictate alike of duty and of wisdom to commit the hour to Him, and never to oppose our impatient wishes to his will."

"Prayer is intended to increase the devotion of the individual, but if the individual himself prays he requires no formula — he pours himself forth much more naturally in self-chosen and connected thoughts before God, and scarcely requires words at all. Real inward devotion knows no prayer but that arising from the depths of its own feelings."

"Even sleep is characteristic. How charming are children in their lovely innocence! how angel-like their blooming hue! how painful and anxious is the sleep and expression in the countenance of the guilty!"